Free Republic

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Utah Gov. Gary Herbert gave his stamp of approval Monday to a law that brings back the firing squad in the only state that has used it in the past 40 years. Under the law, firing squads will be a backup method if lethal injection drugs aren't available. Utah and other states have struggled to keep up their inventories as European manufacturers opposed to capital punishment refuse to sell the components of lethal injections to U.S. prisons.

Ted Cruz is set to announce is candidacy for President of the United States. Rand Paul is apparently going to announce early next month before going on a campaign tour. Until today technically the only candidate was Jeb Bush, who announced late last year his intentions. At the time everyone thought that Bush was going to force everyone else to declare their candidacy early. It doesn’t appear that has happened, Cruz and Paul have appeared in no rush to make a formal announcement. Scott Walker, perhaps the front runner in the race, still hasn’t formally announced his candidacy and there’s...

A 26-year-old North Ogden woman tried to hide 12 stolen checks under the seat of a patrol car, according to court documents. Kerri Roean Tennant was arrested by a Utah Highway Patrol trooper early Wednesday morning. At the time of her arrest, Tennant had given officers a false name, according to the probable cause statement filed in 2nd District Court in Ogden. She was later identified and troopers learned she had a warrant issued for her arrest out of Morgan County. Troopers found methamphetamine, drug paraphernalia and an altered Utah driver’s license on Tennant, according to the document. A second...

predation, not human activity, has reduced bird’s numbers. A coalition of rural Western counties and business interests is contesting the science being used to decide whether to list the Greater sage-grouse as endangered or threatened, accusing the Obama administration of relying on “selective, false and biased” research. Denver attorney Kent Holsinger filed three Data Quality Act challenges Wednesday with the Department of the Interior on behalf of the coalition, which includes the Western Energy Alliance, ranchers, mining and drilling companies and 19 counties in Colorado, Montana, Nevada and Utah. “We’ve documented real issues with transparency and scientific integrity ... The...

Republican Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Marco Rubio of Florida have released a blueprint for federal tax reform called “The Economic Growth and Family Fairness Tax Plan.” First, we should not embrace the language of progressive socialism in believing tax reform should have as a goal to advance “family fairness.” The plan should simply be entitled “The American Growth and Opportunity Plan.” That said, the Lee-Rubio plan is a great improvement over the current system. For the individual tax structure, the plan introduces a two-tier system to replace the current seven tax brackets. This plan moves America from a...

Congress’s two top tax chairmen warned President Obama on Wednesday not to claim unilateral executive powers to raise taxes on his own, saying it violates the Constitution and ruins chances for a lasting deal. Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said they were troubled by White House’s announcement earlier this month that Mr. Obama is “very interested” in exploring what options he has to raise taxes without going through Congress. “This would be a mistake, both constitutionally and politically,” the two lawmakers said, adding...

Talk about the Norfolk terrier tail wagging the Great Dane. If they are to have any hope of winning their party’s nomination, Republican presidential hopefuls better support ethanol mandates, Hawkeye State politicos told potential candidates at the recent Iowa Agricultural Summit in Des Moines. “Don’t mess with the RFS,” Republican Governor Terry Branstad warned, referring to Renewable Fuel Standards that require refiners to blend increasing amounts of ethanol into gasoline. “It is the Holy Grail, and I will defend it,” said Rep. Steve King, another Iowa Republican. It is vital for reducing carbon dioxide emissions and preventing dangerous climate change...

<p>Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky were among the top Republicans receiving high ratings from the influential antitax Club for Growth, which released its annual scorecard of House and Senate lawmakers on Monday.</p> <p>Mr. Cruz , along with Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah) and Rep. Matt Salmon (R., Ariz.), make up a select group of lawmakers from either the House and Senate who can boast of a perfect 2013 and lifetime score from the group. Those three, along with Reps. Trent Franks (R., Ariz.), Tom McClintock (R., Calif.) and David Schweikert (R., Ariz.) were the only lawmakers to receive a perfect 100% score for 2013, according to the group.</p>

The conservative Club For Growth released its annual scorecard for 2013 on Monday, bestowing two Republican U.S. senators — Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah — and four GOP congressmen with 100 percent ratings for their voting records “based on issues relating to limited government and economic growth.”The four congressmen with perfect ratings for 2013 are Republican Reps. Matt Salmon, Trent Franks and David Schweikert of Arizona and Tom McClintock of California. Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan got a 99 percent rating in 2013 “but because of rounding has a 100 percent LifeScore,” the group said.“2013 saw...

With just a point and a click, you can browse a face book of felons, a new government website that will warn of the danger these criminals pose to society.Only these are not the faces of sex offenders and serial killers. These criminals are mortgage schemers and inside traders, most likely armed with nothing more than an M.B.A. or a law degree.Their faces will soon appear online courtesy of the Utah Legislature, which on Wednesday approved a measure to build the nation’s first white-collar offender registry, appending a scarlet letter of sorts on the state’s financial felons. The registry —...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker says President Barack Obama’s Attorney General nominee, Loretta Lynch, is unfit to be the nation’s top lawyer because of her support for executive amnesty and other positions she’s taken, the governor’s spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski tells Breitbart News.“Given Loretta Lynch’s failure to commit to protect Americans from the president’s lawless executive overreach, that even he said nearly two dozen times, she is not fit to serve as the nation’s Attorney General,” Kukowski said in an email.Walker is in New Hampshire,the first in the nation primary state,on Friday, meeting with—among other—former Sen. Scott Brown(R-MA)—who narrowly lost to Sen....

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) argued for criminal justice reform at a historically black college in Maryland on Friday, in what has become a staple of his message to young voters and minorities ahead of a potential presidential run in 2016. Paul, who has frequently nodded to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s idea that there are “two Americas,” said in his speech at Bowie State University there’s one America where citizens are free to pursue their lives freely, and one where the federal government piles on with unnecessary laws, burdensome fines and regulations, and overly strict sentencing guidelines that contribute to keeping...

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A Mormon-church-backed anti-discrimination bill that protects LGBT Utah residents and religious rights received final approval at the state's Republican-controlled Legislature on Wednesday. The House of Representatives voted 65-10 to pass the bill, which was only unveiled last week. The Senate passed it Friday. The bill earned a rare endorsement from the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which helped fast-track the measure through the Legislature. Gov. Gary Herbert, a Republican and member of the church, has said he'll sign the bill.

Lawmakers in Utah voted last night to bring back executions by firing squad if lethal injections are unavailable, which would make it the only state in the country to permit the practice. Utah used firing squads for decades before adopting lethal injections in 2004. The Republican-sponsored bill, which passed the state Senate by 18-10, was introduced amid national concerns about the efficacy of lethal injections. The measure, approved last month by the Utah House of Representatives, says a firing squad should be used if "the state is unable to lawfully obtain the substance or substances necessary to conduct an execution...

Four police officers rushing to an overturned car in an icy Utah river say they all heard the same thing: a mysterious female voice calling out “Help,” from inside the vehicle. But the driver of the car was dead and her 18-month-old daughter, while still alive, couldn’t have been the speaker. It was a mystery that continues to haunt the officers – and may never be explained.

A mystery arose from the rescue: The police officers who entered the water say they heard a voice calling for help. The mother was dead, but the officers said that they heard an adult's voice calling to them. "The four of us heard a distinct voice coming from the car," Warner told CNN. "To me, it didn't sound like a child's voice." The voice gave the rescuers a surge of adrenaline needed to push the vehicle upright, he said. The mother was dead. The child was unconscious, but her eyelids were fluttering, and the rescuers knew she was alive, Warner...

The Utah officers cannot explain it, but a mysterious voice that appeared to come from a wrecked car led them to the rescue of an unconscious 18-month-old baby that had been trapped for 14 hours.

Forty-seven Senate Republicans are signaling in an open letter to Iran and the White House that a deal over Tehran’s nuclear program will be at risk once President Obama leaves office. “It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system,” the senators wrote in the letter, which was first reported by Bloomberg. “Thus, we are writing to bring to your attention two features of our Constitution — the power to make binding international agreements and the different character of federal offices — which you should seriously...

No one in American life is more committed to religious liberty for all than the Latter-day Saints. We disagree strongly on crucial matters of faith—including the question of what the gospel is and what the church is, even over the question of who and what God is. But we work together for religious liberty, because we can have those debates while simultaneously agreeing that we ought to have the freedom to have them without government interference. We don’t have to agree on whether Joseph Smith was right about golden plates to agree that Thomas Jefferson was right about inalienable rights....

The Utah compromise contains way too much legalese for me to comprehensively evaluate it today. But reading the bill, and the response to it from the gay-rights establishment, leads me to say, sincerely and from the bottom of my heart, something I never expected to say: Thanks, Human Rights Campaign.